New context sensitive right mouse button menu in JOSM’s history viewer

[Actual Category]

People reading this announcement of collaboration between Niantic and OSM on April 1st, might have been tempted to believe it. Alas, maybe next year. 🙂 No new legendary monsters for you.

Mapping

Ilya Zverev reminds us of his RFC on the tagging list. It concerns dropping public_transport=* tags for stops, as they seem superfluous and going back to simply highway=bus_stop/railway=tram_stop. Those tags still need to be added anyway, if you want them to render on the main site.

Apparently, one mapper has been adding names invented by himself to all aerodromes in Europe that didn’t already have names. A number of other mappers disagree with this practice. Frederik Ramm clarifies his stance on the matter.

You can influence the proposal for landuse=autodrome with your vote until April 11th.

The voting period for the proposal about airsoft shop tagging is open until April 11th.

SketchOSM is a plugin for SketchUp that allows you to add new buildings to OSM in 3D (editing existing OSM buildings isn’t possible at present). A new feature called PhotoMatch, allows you to match the building height to street level imagery. Despite looking like an awesome tool, the usage of Google StreetView to add details using this new PhotoMatch is problematic. The author suggested to look into using Mapillary and OpenStreetCam for this purpose.

The Vermont Transportation Agency shared 5 million images from the last five years on Mapillary.

Community

Some categories of OSM Awards 2018 still miss candidates. You are invited to add nominations until May 31st.

Rory McCann is looking for help on the Diversity-Talk mailing list for a special quarterly project modelled on an example set by the British community.

Skinfaxi proposes on the German forum (automatic translation) to get started with a monthly or quarterly task to improve the long distance European hiking trails in OSM.

Bryan Housel wants to compile a list of communication resources (mailing lists, FB groups, slack channels, etc) to suggest to mappers, so it becomes easier to communicate with other mappers near them. However, a project to collect local pub meetings exists already at usergroups.openstreetmap.de (source code).

Tirkon mentions on the German forum (automatic translation) that Facebook is a Gold Sponsor of the State of the Map 2018 in Milan and triggers a discussion about how Facebook’s interests contrast with the interests of the OSM community (we reported this previously). The recent debates about Facebook’s editing activities in OSM are reflected in the discussion, even though support from financially strong sponsors is of course good.

OpenStreetMap Foundation

OpenCanalMap clarifies on its website that they are not related to OpenStreetMap, as per OSMF’s trademark policy.

Humanitarian OSM

Dan Joseph, GIS staff member of the American Red Cross, describes in the Mapillary blog how they use Mapillary in their organization.

Missing Maps announces a new major version of leaderboard, their mapping teams‘ coordination platform.

The World Bank reports on ReliefWeb about the impact of their OpenCity program in Nepal. This project aims to build seismic resilience in the Kathmandu Valley by training civilians to map their local areas. While the project concluded in 2013, the report discusses about the work that followed for the local organization Kathmandu Living Labs (KLL). This shows for authors that disaster risk management and urban planning projects can be legitimately and successfully continued there together with the government.

Education

Shahriar Alam aims to bring mappers around the world using different OSM editors closer together with his new video series (Part A, Part B) thoroughly explaining everything there is to know.

User Spanholz made several video tutorials for JOSM, and shared them on Reddit asking for feedback.

Maps

Atlas of Me is a Google Chrome plugin that converts mentions of distances or area surface measurements in article text into something the reader can more easily relate to, by converting them into measurements with a more familiar object as a reference.

Kocio-pl has created a pull request for OSM Carto to hide platforms tagged with location=underground.

Licences

Releases

JOSM’s latest release is 18.03. The most important changes are establishing compatibility with Java 10 converting links from HTTP to HTTPS. When looking at the history of objects, there is a new context sensitive menu similar to the one in tag properties making it easy to copy values or tags.

We like to remind you of the current OSM software Watchlist listing information on the releases of almost all OSM related software.

Did you know …

… El Mapa del Asado, a map based on OSM with locations of butchers and the price of meat for grilling (asado)?

Other “geo” things

Reddit user JakeThyCamel explains how to use JOSM in combination with Maperitive to create maps of imaginary worlds and render them.

Christian Trapp describes his unsuccessful tribulations with setting up DGPS.

A new „Bike Map of Lübeck“ was created. The bicycle map was developed in a cooperation of the publishing house Kalimedia with the city, the ADFC and the OpenStreetMap Community.

Scientific American compares the geographical orientation of humans who use increasingly modern maps, to the many animal groups, that also migrate over very long distances using their own natural sense of orientation, as their life’s rhythm dictates. Through geotracking of these animals and new interactive maps, humans can more easily follow and understand these still unexplored paths of the animal world.

Editorial Page – About Us – Contact

What is the idea?

weeklyOSM updates the community, on a weekly basis, about what is going on in the OSM Universe. weeklyOSM is intended for everyone, from experienced mappers to new OSM members. It is created by mappers and OSM enthusiasts. Contributors to weeklyOSM in all languages are always welcome. Due to the enormous workload (52 issues per year, no vacations, no holidays) new languages can only be set up if three mappers agree to cooperate.

The idea of weeklyOSM is to collect relevant OSM news from all over the world, process it and translate it into as many languages as possible. This should help to inform the community as comprehensively as possible and overcome language barriers.

weeklyOSM is independent of all organisations and companies. This applies to OSMF, HOT, FOSSGIS … and all other companies not listed here. Nevertheless, we would be happy if our current issue (in whatever language) would appear on the start page of the Wiki on an equal footing with „Use OpenStreetMap“, „Contribute free map data“ and „Software Development“. We would also like to point out that the editorial staff are not subject to OSMF supervision.